Kidney Transplant 6 Years In: Trying To Be A Hero Like Ricky

My first day home after receiving a new kidney.

Six years ago this morning I woke up like any other morning. As long as by any other morning, you mean in the hospital waiting for a kidney you’ve been told was on its way.

Two evenings earlier I’d been at home, sitting on the couch with Amy, as always my better 83 percent. The phone rang; not unusual except it was the house phone, not one of our cell phones.

As I got up, I said to Amy that I bet it was OHSU calling to tell me that they’d found me a kidney. That’s exactly what the call was.

I’d been on dialysis for almost exactly five and a half years at that point; dialysis is a pleasant process by which you’re hooked up to two needles that take the blood out of your body through one needle, cleans it and puts it back through the other needle.

By pleasant, I mean it keeps you alive.

Kidneys are supposed to clean your blood. After a strange incident in which my potassium shot up, approaching 10, a point where organ failure becomes a distinct possibility, my kidneys started down the path to failure.

While dialysis - again, a procedure in such you sit for six hours three times a week with needles in your arms - kept me alive, it was hard to stay positive because it quickly becomes very clear that getting a kidney is not guaranteed. The year I got my kidney there were about 110,000 people waiting for an organ transplant in the United States; the majority needed a kidney.

At that time, around 13 of those people died every day.

To qualify for a replacement kidney, you need to meet a bunch of metrics including having to be relatively healthy other than the kidney failure. As horrible as it sounds, they don’t want to put a kidney in someone who may not live that long even with a working kidney. So, they take a lot of blood, approaching 30 vials, to run tests to make sure things are good inside.

Another metric is more discernible on the outside.

To receive a kidney, you have to have a relatively low body mass index. To put it simply, you can’t be ridiculously overweight. When I was first put on the transplant list, I was in pretty good shape. The longer I was on the list, the more weight I put on until I’d become really fat. When losing weight is a life and death situation, every pound you need to lose seems like 10.

It reached the point where the doctors switched me to inactive on the transplant list. I wouldn’t lose my place on the list but if a kidney became available, I wouldn’t get it; I wouldn’t be eligible until I lost the weight.  While that did little to lift my depression, it did act as a motivator though not quite at the level a person without depression might see it.

While I’ve always known there are things that I’m good at and I’ve had a good share of accomplishments – helping a guy get out of prison where he’d been for 19 years for a murder he didn’t commit, to name one – I’ve always considered myself fairly unworthy, certainly unworthy of my life being saved by someone I’ve never met.

So, I started losing weight but without urgency.

Fortunately, soon after, I got Legionnaires’ Disease; not a sentence you expect to read. As a result of the, maybe not near-death but certainly not that far off, I suddenly lost weight, a lot of weight. I was moved from inactive back to active on the list and that brings us to the morning of July 11. I’d been in the hospital for two nights, listening as they told me they were just waiting to figure out which of two “perfect” kidneys I’d get.

While that sounded great, all I knew for sure was that I was in the hospital and I’d have to undergo dialysis while we waited. I was quietly cursing the wait not knowing that the delay because a man named Ricky in California had been in what would become a fatal motorcycle crash and doctors were trying to decide where his organs would go. I was getting a kidney.

Doctors warned me that some donated kidneys, even though they might be a perfect match on paper, just don’t work out. Ricky’s worked perfectly. I woke up the next morning and I haven’t been back to dialysis.

Ricky had checked yes on being an organ donor on his driver’s license. I’ve done the same. You should do it also.  Remember when I said earlier that 13 people were dying every day while waiting for a transplant? That number is now 21 people a day.

Say it with me. Twenty-one people die every day while waiting for an organ donation that never arrived. Part of that problem is bureaucratic. The nonprofit that is in charge of making sure organs get where they need to be in time to be used is so poorly run that there have been congressional hearings.

I think of Ricky every single day as I try to lose weight again. My kidney is fine. I let Ricky know that every day; I had lab tests last week and my numbers are excellent. Despite my kidney being healthy, I still need to lose weight; depression sucks. While you can often keep depression at bay and be happy, it’s usually still lurking around.

I’m going to lose the weight because it’s best for me, for my family, for the people I love. I’m also going to lose it because one day, a day I hope is years and years away, I want to make sure that, like Ricky, I can be someone’s hero. Giving a kidney won’t be an option but there’s my liver, pancreas, lungs, heart and more.

We can all be heroes.